Killer Haley Barbour Diary on Kos

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An excerpt:

Our Democratic candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor are running on trying to cut the regressive grocery tax, the highest in the country. Barbour, a former top tobacco lobbyist, still with financial ties to his former lobbying firm, has repeatedly killed the tax swap legislation that would cut the food tax and offset the revenue loss with a raise of the third lowest tobacco tax in the country. Even the current incumbent Lt. Governor, Republican Amy Tuck has championed the tax swap.

I wonder why?

Barbour had been among the tobacco industry's top lobbyists prior to returning to Mississippi. Between 1998 and 2002, such tobacco companies as Phillip Morris, RJR Nabisco, Brown and Williamson, and U.S. Tobacco paid his firm $3.8 million. The firm has collected more than $2 million in tobacco revenue since Barbour became governor.

Barbour’s grip on power here has even members of his own party scared of him:

To this day, few in the GOP have dared cross Barbour on the matter. Recently, lobbyists from the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program asked several Republicans to pledge to raise the tobacco tax. They encountered near-universal resistance. "A lot of Republicans are saying, Do you know what you're doing? If I sign this thing, then Haley will come and dump more money into my opponent's campaign,'" says Roy Mitchell, the program's director.

And he rewarded his friends with Katrina money for towing the line on the food/tobacco tax swap legislation:

This year, legislators tried again, introducing two more bills that would have halved the state's grocery tax and raised the cigarette tax by $1. Barbour didn't even lift his veto pen this time around--the bills died at the hands of Senate finance committee chairman Tommy Robertson. Oddly, Robertson had been a vocal advocate of previous tax-swap bills. Earlier this year, however, he and two other Republican legislators--who, in their day jobs, are lawyers--had received a $1.2 million contract from the Mississippi Development Authority, which is overseen by the governor, to help homeowners finalize their Katrina grants. The contract raised more than a few eyebrows. (In an interview, Robertson said the contract--which was cleared by the state ethics commission on a party-line vote--had "absolutely nothing" to do with his stance on the tax swap.)

Sure Tommy.

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